[tony west]"what was the price of Avid (roughly) before FCP came out?"

Remember Tony, until very recently there was no such thing as Avid software "out of the box," because Avid systems required hardware.

For the record, when I initially contemplated buying my first NLE system, in the early 1990s, an Avid 8000 system, without any storage, was speced-out for me at $160K. Keep in mind, that was offline quality, with the final work product being an online-ready EDL.

The computers of the day couldn't handle anything close to online quality video, and storage at that time was so expensive you couldn't even think about online quality even had the computer been powerful enough to do the job.